They weren't the cheapest for the case, but they were one of three companies that would ship outside of the USA, and they did offer cheap (i.e. not FedEx or UPS) shipping.

Did you get it for less than USD$360? I think that's what we could have done on the same item to Sydney from our location, though international orders would be a special case for us, too.

Also, I hope the reason Sharka listed the D6's shipping weight as being so heavy is because they put it in lots of extra packing... According to the Ahanix website http://www.ahanix.com/dvine6sq.html, it weighs 16 pounds in its package, not 28 (it's as if they think the packaging weighs 16 pounds, and they added the 12 pounds from the case to get total weight). I sure hope they didn't make you pay to ship 12 extra pounds across the ocean...

Is there room in the case to sandwich the HDD or place it inside an active-cooling enclosure?

I have a regular tower, so yes. However, I don't think damping is going to make a Western Digital drive quiet enough...

Human wrote:

Once the 200GB Samsungs come out, would you go for one of those?

Yup. I would probably look around here first because overseas shipping and duties.

Another thing I haven't started researching yet are DVD ROMs. Basically, I'm looking for something that is quiet, easily RCF1 (region free) flashable, macrovision disabled, UOPS disabled (might be SW) and supports reduced speeds. I would probably even pay extra for an overseas order if it would save me the research.

Something else you might consider are receivers that work well with MythTV. I have a Pioneer and plan to set it up to be controlled via the PC (http://winlirc.sourceforge.net/controlbywire.html). That's on my list somewhere after an IR receiver...

Did you get it for less than USD$360? I think that's what we could have done on the same item to Sydney from our location, though international orders would be a special case for us, too.

Now you tell me

Case was $260, shipping $134 for USPS Global Express. I don't remember what determined the shipping price, but the packing was just the factory Ahanix box. I will look up the receipt tonight, but yes they may have rippped me off a bit.

Of course, this is the problem with ordering from a web page in a hurry, instead of talking with a real person like yourself

...I will look up the receipt tonight, but yes they may have rippped me off a bit.

Of course, this is the problem with ordering from a web page in a hurry, instead of talking with a real person like yourself

At the time you ordered your case, I don't think we'd have been able to take your order, so don't feel too bad We plan to eventually set up to handle international orders, but it'll take time. In the meantime, if you need to buy anything else related to MythTV, run it by me and we'll see if we can process your order differently.

Here are our US prices, including shipping, for items we currently sell. Your prices would have additional international shipping costs added in, which would be quite a bit, unfortunately.

In the back of my head I have plans to rebuild my pvr around a mini-itx board. I think much of the expense with setting these up are due to the lack of vendors. They need custom cases and memory as well. Since the PVR-350 handles most of the work for me I just need something cheap and small to plug it into that has ethernet and IDE.

my vison for mini-itx was always as a cheap small quiet frontend. since it has xvmc support for the onboard video you wouldn't even need a card in it. And with the proper setup you could have it network boot, and it wouldn't have to have a harddrive either. just the board, ram, and a case. Now that would be sweet.

_________________Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

You read my mind. Thats the other thing I want to do with a mini-itx board. I wasn't sure if you could get the frontend working with network boot. Getting a simple frontend box for my second TV is definantly on my list of things to figure out. I suppose I would custom build the case since I wouldn't want it to be much bigger than the board.

Lets see, Network boot, no local disk, fanless and best of all its a Mini-MythTV frontend, now were talking... Sounds like a great topic for the wiki. Hardware choices, kernel how-tos, etc.. I see where some of the minis support MPEG2 acceleration, I wonder how it would work with xvid and MPEG4 video?

I just wanted to let everyone know we moved our store and have several new items. Take a look at http://mythic.tv We offer a number of quiet components, video converters, and most importantly the Air2PC-ATSC-PCI card for $169.00 and free shipping.

Also, we're going to evaluate the nano-ITX platform when it comes out to see if it makes a good basis for a MythTV frontend. It has the potential to be totally silent, and there are lots of sleek cases for the form factor, even though nobody sells the nano boards yet

He says that it eats less CPU than the HD-3000 because of "hardware filtering and also a 4th gen tuner/demodulator." I don't claim to know what those things do, but he seemed to think they'd help. You're saying that this doesn't make a difference?

The product's spec sheet is here: http://www.bbti.us/download/datasheets/ ... SC-PCI.pdf It mentions having an MPEG-2 decoder, but that's the only thing I read there that seems like it'd reduce CPU requirements, but that'd only be on playback. However, the HD3000 doesn't have that. So maybe the spirit of what our site said was saying was correct, but it was backwards?

I think I understand what the thread is talking about. When you receive an ATSC broadcast, there can be several programs ("pids") multiplexed into a single stream. Those programs are what you see as channels 4.1, 4.2, etc. The pcHDTV card doesn't separate or filter out those extra pids in hardware, but the DVB card does.

I'm sure that is a savings of processor overhead, but it can't be a lot. On my 3.2GHz P4 box, recording a stream from the pcHDTV takes only 1.3% of my CPU. (For comparison, the "top" command I use to find this information takes 0.7% by itself.)

Still, I find the new DVB card a very interesting product and I'll probably break down and get one soon.

Another idea for your Myth store: Antec Phantom fanless power supply, or the equivalent power supply from Silverstone. Both are very highly rated. The Antec has a little more power output and may be less expensive.

I think I understand what the thread is talking about. When you receive an ATSC broadcast, there can be several programs ("pids") multiplexed into a single stream. Those programs are what you see as channels 4.1, 4.2, etc. The pcHDTV card doesn't separate or filter out those extra pids in hardware, but the DVB card does.

I'm sure that is a savings of processor overhead, but it can't be a lot. On my 3.2GHz P4 box, recording a stream from the pcHDTV takes only 1.3% of my CPU. (For comparison, the "top" command I use to find this information takes 0.7% by itself.)

That's correct. I just confirmed this with the distributor, and they do say that for high-end processors, the drop in CPU load during encoding would be insignificant. However, lower-end CPUs may get a nice break. In fact, I confirmed with them that the Air2PC has onboard MPEG-2 decoding, kinda like a PVR-350. So it's easy to envision the Air2PC card in a system with a lesser CPU.

Still, I find the new DVB card a very interesting product and I'll probably break down and get one soon.

Very cool. It's certainly cheaper than the HD-3000, and it does appear to do more onboard.

Liv2Cod wrote:

Another idea for your Myth store: Antec Phantom fanless power supply, or the equivalent power supply from Silverstone. Both are very highly rated. The Antec has a little more power output and may be less expensive.

We've looked into this, and we do plan to offer fanless PSUs once we can get the right agreements in place. We lined up distributors for both Antec and Silverstone products, but their prices are still too high. For now, you're better off going to PriceWatch.com and getting them there.

Be aware, however, fanless PSUs can cost double the amount per Watt of their quiet counterparts. They also generally need lots of airflow within the case to compensate for the lack of fans in the PSU. I recently purchased a Nexus NX-3500 PSU for my work machine, and it has a 120mm rebranded Yate Loon fan. If I'd gotten a fanless PSU and added a 120mm fan, it would have cost more and required me to mod my case.

Of course, there are scenarios in which you wouldn't need to add a case fan to help a fanless PSU, which is why we do hope to add them to our lineup.

Thank you very much for your feedback! It'll help us build a better store for the community.

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